Georgia House rejects bill to ban municipal fiber networks

Bill banned muni networks where private firms offered 3Mbps service.

Georgia's House of Representatives dealt a blow to major telecommunications incumbents Thursday when it rejected legislation that would have precluded many Georgia towns from getting into the broadband business. The vote was 94 to 70.

An earlier version of the legislation would have banned municipal broadband networks if any private firm was offering service with a speed of at least 1.5Mbps. The latest version raised the minimum to 3Mbps in an effort to appease critics.

The legislation was sponsored by Rep. Mark Hamilton, a Republican. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hamilton believed that allowing towns to get into the broadband market "erodes the free market and is a waste of taxpayer money."

But a coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans rejected Hamilton's proposal. Rep. Jay Powell, a Republican opponent, argued that the lack of high-speed networks was hurting the economic competitiveness of small towns.

“You cannot get it, you cannot keep it without high speed fiber,” Powell said, according to the Journal-Constitution. Private broadband firms, he said, wouldn't provide high-speed service “because they knew they didn’t have to. They provided whatever crumbs from the table they wanted.”

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.